The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.4

About this book

The days are short. The lights are somebody else's idea.

Sumi Takamine kept the summer of the repainting and learned to make a form of her own. Winter asks the opposite of her. The valley — which has never once asked the station's permission for anything it truly intended — has put up a string of borrowed lights along the station front and across the red footbridge, and logged the bulbs in her book, like freight. Now someone has to keep them lit, bulb by bulb, until February: a retired school cook who writes every kindness she receives in a ledger and tries to repay it before nightfall; a young man who works the valley's nights and buys, at the platform machine that always runs out of it, the corn soup of his childhood; an illustrator who has not drawn since autumn, who agrees to draw one picture for nobody; a couple learning, after forty years, to take the same train in separate seats; a joiner who must sign his own name; a girl who has decided on the examination she will not sit; and a clerk who has thanked this station, unsigned, for twenty winters.

Eight new linked stories, all written for this volume. In summer the stationmaster learned to pour. This winter she learns to be poured for — because at Hoshizaki the care goes round, or it does not go at all, and winter is when you can see it going round: it is dark by five, the lights are on, and someone — never the same someone twice — has come down to the platform to switch them on.

The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.4 can be read on its own — and readers of the earlier volumes will find the handover survived its first winter, the corn-soup machine faithful to its one winter duty, and the cat — eight years old, greying very slightly, conducting a complete audit of the season from the warmest square of the waiting-room floor — exactly where he was. About 70,000 words — one station, one winter, eight journeys.